Setting Up Wireless Network

Hope everyone is well. I havent been here in awhile. The new setup looks nice!

Here is my deal. I was trying to set up a wireless network for my parents. They have a desktop with XP Pro and a new Dell Inspiron 8200(laptop) with XP Home. With the laptop they bought a Dell 1170 Wireless network setup. The laptop has the 1150 wirelss in it. My understanding is that the 1170 is acting basically as a router, maybe. The connection goes like this. Cable to Cable Modem. Modem to 1170. The 1170 send a signal to the Inspiron, as well it has a LAN port and an Ethernet cable goes from the 1170 to the desktop. I FINALLY got the two computers to be able to ping each other and see each other in the My Network its just that now neither one will access the internet. So I am assuming I have a configuration wrong in the 1170.

Am I supposed to assign the 1170 with an IP of like 192.168.2.1 (which seems to be a default one for configuring it)? When I manually configured it, I gave it the IP that my parents ISP gave them. The 1170 has DHCP so it assigned the other two IPs of 192.168.2.2 and 2.3

I hope this makes sense to someone and someone maybe has a clue as to what I can do to get them to access the internet.

ok so here is a bit of basic info on routers. they have two interfaces. a private and a public interface. the public interface is what connects to the public network, the internet. the private interface is what connects to your private network. both need ip addresses. the public interface needs to be configured with ip address of your ISPs' DNS and DHCP servers. it will then pick up its own ip address. the way i ususally set up the private interface is i assign it the ip of 192.168.0.1. then i set its built in DHCP server to hand out only as many ip address as there are computers connecting to it. using the range 192.168.0.2 - 192.168.0.254(in your case it would be 192.168.0.2 - 192.168.0.4)next you have to go to your desktop and laptop, go into the tcp/ip properties and make sure its all set to aquire everything automaticaly.

thanks, it does help somewhat. the two pc's are set correctly from what I can tell. They have generic IPs that were assigned by the 1170. It the 1170 connecting to the public is where I am having the problem. And based on what you told me, and what I just thought of before I posted this, was that I need to set an (internal) IP for the 1170.

well want is going on is they both want a public ip addrss but you dont have to do that you can nat them look up on google on NATing that should help you and if you have XP home make sure you go in and turn on network servise because it comes defult off and you have to manual change it to start to do this:

right click my computer
mange
services and application plus sign
services
then click on network connections and on the left click start